Parashat Acharei Mot

Growing up in Troy as a Jew, I always knew I was “different” from everyone else. But it was not really until Pesach, I think, that everyone else realized it too. Perhaps that was because for an entire week of school—while everyone else enjoyed their white bread sandwiches and Twinkies (it was Troy, after all)—I crunched away on my matzoh and enjoyed a homemade, thick-as-a-brick brownie. My mother always made sure to pack extra matzoh too because my friends all wanted to have some of that “funny looking cracker!” As grade school gave way to college, I still had to keep extra matzoh around. My neighbor in the dormitory thought matzoh pizza was the best food in the world. Every evening during Passover at dinnertime, like clockwork, she would drop by and ask for matzoh pizza. I always obliged but, to this day, I find it entirely fascinating: for an entire week Jews complain about eating matzoh and for an entire week our non-Jewish friends can’t wait to eat it! With obligation, comes a difference.
This week before Passover, on Shabbat HaGadol (the Great Sabbath), we read from our Torah Parashat Acharei Mot. God instructs our ancestors through Moses, “I am the LORD your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt where you dwelt shall you not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan, where I bring you, shall you not do; nor shall you walk in their ordinances. You shall do my judgments, and keep my ordinances, to walk with them; I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments which, if a person does, he shall live in them; I am The LORD” (Leviticus 18:1-5). The Jewish legal midrashic collection Sifra explains “my judgments” refers to laws that should have been written if the Torah had not done so: those about robbery, incest, idolatry, cursing God, or bloodshed.” The statement “My ordinances” refers to “the laws contested by man’s evil inclination and by idolaters—such as the ban on eating pork, the mixing of wool and linen in clothing, the release of a childless widow from needing to marry her brother-in-law, the purification of the leper, the red heifer, the he-goat sent into the wilderness on Yom Kippur. Hence the Torah states, ‘I am Adonai’—and I have decreed them, do not question them.” In other words, God has given us laws that “make sense” and those that make “less” sense. Many of these laws, our rabbis teach us, are there simply to make us feel different—separate—from our non-Jewish neighbors.
For many of us, Passover is that time we feel most different: whether it is bringing matzoh for lunch to work, cleaning our homes top to bottom, being even more stringent in the food we purchase, or creating elaborate, engaging Jewish experiences for our families during the seder. “Different” is sometimes difficult, complicated, bewildering and, for children, frustrating. But “different” can also be a blessing: “With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” God did redeem us from slavery that we might serve Him, “for God’s love endures forever” (Psalm 136:12).

Rebecca, Caleb, and Ayal join me in wishing you Shabbat shalom and chag Pesach kasher v’sameach.

Rabbi Aaron L. Starr
Director of Education & Youth
rabbistarr@shaareyzedek.org

Follow Rabbi Starr on Twitter! @rabbistarr